521–530 of 772 posts
I disagree with PGs take away, and would love to hear the talk to find out if I'm the one who is wrong. "hire good people and give them room to do their jobs." is not orthogonal to running your start-up as a founder...or is it, and I'm doing it wrong? I'd love to understand where someone like Satya Nadella would fit into this example. He isn't the founder, but he runs the company as if he is, doesn't he? So "founder"…
I think it’s still undecided if Airbnb is a force for good or a force for evil in the world. A lot, I mean a lot of people with middle incomes have bought desirable homes in nice locations and rent them out. There are many aspiring families, young couples priced out of the market because of this. Sure, this option was always a thing but the people who rent these properties out do not improve the community or unit the…
What the hell kind of messing around is that? Did he think he was at the unit he rented that came with door-kicking privileges?
I think this is a classical case of survivorship bias. What about all those companies operating in founder mode that ended up being a disaster? What about all other companies that transitioned away from founder mode and worked even better afterwards? Both categories are conveniently neglected. Take Apple for example. Steve Jobs is mentioned 3 times in the essay. He seems to be the main prototype for a CEO in founder…
At best there are some reasonably good heuristics.
I think it’s still undecided if Airbnb is a force for good or a force for evil in the world. A lot, I mean a lot of people with middle incomes have bought desirable homes in nice locations and rent them out. There are many aspiring families, young couples priced out of the market because of this. Sure, this option was always a thing but the people who rent these properties out do not improve the community or unit the…
> kicked my door front door open What the hell kind of messing around is that? Did he think he was at the unit he rented that came with door-kicking privileges?
They leave trash in the hallways or smoke in the corridors. When you’re on vacation people act a little more free spirited.
I think it’s still undecided if Airbnb is a force for good or a force for evil in the world. A lot, I mean a lot of people with middle incomes have bought desirable homes in nice locations and rent them out. There are many aspiring families, young couples priced out of the market because of this. Sure, this option was always a thing but the people who rent these properties out do not improve the community or unit the…
This is a good piece in that there is absolutely truth to it -- but it's also a bit dangerously non-specific in that it potentially leaves founders with the notion that whatever they happen to think is tautologically correct. To supplement this piece, I would make three specific recommendations that I think tack into the same themes (namely: mistakes founders make -- including trusting the wrong people at the wrong t…
Unwarranted perspective from someone who is not a founder, but works with and has a lot of respect for them I think the common thread between the two blogs is context and detail are important. I kind of think “Founder mode” is just doing your own diligence on your decisions rather than trusting heuristics or outside third parties. The “HR lawyers” or the “professional managers” are probably not nearly as tied to the…
After two unsuccessful but still alive start-ups, I've come to very similar conclusions. Absolutely every single time I've tried to say to it anyone other than a founder I was met with disbelief that eventually turned into accusations of not knowing how to be a leader. While I do admit that I didn't fire people as quickly as I should have, most of our structural problems came from employees simply doing what was best…
> employees simply doing what was best for them No leader should expect anything different from their people. It is your job to align the incentives so that what is best for the employee is to do those things that are best for the company. If you are relying on people to do what is not best for them out of loyalty to a corporation/startup/vision, you do not have an accurate pulse of the modern work force. And yes, wh…
There's always something better I could have done as the person in charge, obviously. I've done a lot of reflection and self-critique, please believe me, and I realized I've made a lot of mistakes, from which the situations could have been recovered though.
Putting my faith in employees, expecting them to do maybe 80-90% of what I was doing as an employee 10 years earlier created an almost unrecoverable situation, that burned the entire runway to unscramble. Yet if I say that my biggest lesson was never to put trust in employees, as it's most likely impossible to create a good incentive system for them, most people won't believe me, as I'm sure you won't either.
I've come to think that the burden is no longer on anyone to create incentive systems, it's on society to reintroduce some morality. Only a limited amount of businesses have the luxury of aligned incentives.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a bit off topic, but I've never understood while people hold Netflix as some engineering Holy Grail. Their product is straightforward feature-wise, and pushing a low-teen megabits per second of static video data on the internet in a somewhat timely manner is not a huge technical challenge nowadays (or 10 years ago). Doing stuff like real-time video streaming, where you have to encode and push video to users with…
Bingo! Watch and be afraid.... https://youtu.be/s-vJcOfrvi0
Yeah, typical corporate development, where often the smallest of changes can be a nightmare:)
I’m at a loss as to how this is getting so many upvotes. A typical hierarchy is bad because you keep hiring “professional fakers”? I don’t know…maybe work on that? The hierarchical structure is key to the most powerful companies, organizations, militaries and governments on earth. But the guy who ran AirBNB was bad at hiring so now we can reject all of that. No. The hierarchy works. There are two key things most mana…
How to fire well?